A lonely, bookish teen struggles to find his identity through Charles Baudelaire’s poetry until two girls, a bully and the class beauty, help him realize true love and real friendship. In the eleventh volume of The Flowers of Evil, Takao Kasuga has blossomed. After years of struggling with his inner demons and a lifetime of boredom, the young man has found peace. Now a high schooler living in the growing city of New Urawa, he has come a long way from his days of riding his bike and hitting used book stores in his sleepy mountain hometown in the rural regions of Gunma prefecture. But now he returns to Gunma, intent on finding the person who set him on this journey of self-discovery, for some closure.